The Cultural Functions of Climate (original) (raw)

Editor's Introduction: The Cultures of Climate

SAGE Major Reference Work: Climates and Cultures, 2015

This SAGE Major Reference Work -- 'Climates and Cultures' -- brings together recent scholarship concerned with the interweaving of two enduring ideas of the human mind: the idea of climate and the idea of culture. These ideas are not just enduring, but also powerful, in part because like any interesting words they both defy easy definition. In this introductory essay I reflect on how the ideas of climate and culture engage with and mutually shape each other. The essay therefore provides a justification for the six-Volume Reference Work, whose contents I also introduce.

Climate and its changes: a cultural appraisal

Geography and Environment, 2015

Geographers and Geography has long been acquainted with the idea of climate. For much of the last century, climatology was one of the canonical sub-fields of physical geography and interactions between climate and the human world have proved fruitful sites of geographical inquiry. Although much contemporary scholarship and applied science is concerned with the idea of climate change, I believe there is important work still to be done on enriching the idea of climate. The argument put forward in this essay is that climate -- as it is imagined and acted upon -- needs to be understood, first and foremost, culturally. Rather than framing climate as an interconnected global physical system or as a statistical artefact of weather measurements, climate should be understood equally as an idea that takes shape in cultures and can therefore be changed by cultures. Climate has a cultural history, which is interwoven with its physical history. It is a history which forms the substrate out of which today’s beliefs, claims and disputes about climate-change emerge. This essay develops two core arguments. First, climate can be understood culturally, as an idea that humans use to stabilise relationships between weather and their patterned lives. In its various manifestations around the world, the idea of climate enables humans to live with their weather through a widening and changing range of cultural resources, practices, artefacts and rituals. Second, I argue that such a cultural understanding of climate alters the way the contemporary idea of climate-change should be conceived; not primarily as a physical process which must be stopped, but as the latest stage in the cultural evolution of the idea of climate.

Cultural History of Climate Change

Course Outline: Climate change has garnered extraordinary attention in sciences and humanities alike. It has defied traditional disciplinary analyses and challenged conventional problem solving by highlighting socio-environmental conditions characterized by unprecedented levels of risks for which world governments do not have ready or convenient solutions. Using historical and contemporary sources, this course aims to understand recent developments in the context of a larger historical and cultural background in which 'climate' and 'climate change' have played a foundational role in shaping traditional and moderns societies. The course aims to explore climate change as a phenomenon inextricably linked to what societies want, think and do and how such wants, ideas and practices inform the contemporary climatological citizenship. Students will explore the cultural and socio-political histories of climate and climate change during the last two centuries. They will learn how to contextualize past representations of climate and examine human dimensions of climate risks in relation to anthropogenic drivers and policy responses to global warming as it gets hold in the politics of contemporary carbon democracies. The course will examine how climate has been perceived, known and understood by contemporary and past societies; how it became socially and culturally constituted as a hazard (or a resource); what weather and climate have mean to different individuals, groups and institutions, and how these meanings influenced the ways in which people individually and collectively respond to the climate change problem today. Using a multidisciplinary approach, we comprehensively explore the uses of 'climate' from colonialism to racism, from mercantilism to globalism and from climatic determinism to climate engineering. This 8-week lesson plan is intended toward upper-level undergraduates or graduate students. The content and learning outcomes will be relevant to students in human, geographical, political and environmental sciences keen to develop a contextual understanding of climate issues and apply it to their field of academic interest and professional career. Assigned readings and discussion questions are included to provide an understanding of the ideas to be discussed in class.

Weathered: Cultures of Climate (extract)

Weathered: Cultures of Climate opens up the many ways in which the idea of climate is given meaning in different human cultures and how it is used; how climates are historicised, known, changed, lived with, blamed, feared, represented, predicted, governed and, at least putatively, redesigned. These actions performed on or with the idea of climate emerge from the diverse cultural interpretations of humans’ sensory experience of the atmosphere’s restless weather. Weathered develops a case for understanding climate as an enduring, yet malleable, idea which humans use to stabilise cultural relationships with their weather. The discursive phenomenon of climate-change should therefore be understood as a ubiquitous trope through which the material, psychological and cultural agency of climate is exercised in today’s world. In this sense the phenomenon of climate-change is not a decisive break from the past. Neither is it a unique outcome of modernity. Climate-change should rather be seen as the latest stage in the cultural evolution of the idea of climate, an idea which enables humans to live with their weather through a widening and changing range of cultural and material artefacts, practices, rituals and symbols.